How to Plan a Group Vacation

In a group vacation, it doesn’t matter how many members of the party are planners, how much thought they’ve all put into the plan, or how enthusiastically everyone agrees to the plan. It only takes one member of the group to be a play-it-by-ear type to completely derail the plan and force everyone else to play it by ear with them.

Want to see this in action? Go to the Target store near the main entrance to Walt Disney World some morning at about the time the parks open. You will see multiple clusters of frustrated looking people with one member of their group saying that they’re “just popping in” for sunscreen, ponchos, and “while I’m here, I’ll take a quick look at the sweatshirts.”

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How to Accept a Difference of Opinion

When I was a kid, my mother thought video games were a complete waste of time and money. She maintained that opinion until my younger brother’s best friend brought over his Gameboy, and she got her first taste of Tetris. Within a month she bought herself a Gameboy and a Tetris cartridge. That cartridge never left the cartridge slot, and that Game Boy never left the vicinity of her easy chair for a good decade at least, until it stopped working. She played Tetris every chance she got.

Don’t worry, though. As far as she was concerned, every other video game was still a waste of time and money.

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How to Welcome a New Team Member

I like the idea of my superhero, Third Person, but I see now that she had the laziest hero costume I ever came up with. Also, the tiara made out of a three didn’t read as well as I’d hoped it would.

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How to React When Someone Surprises You by Being Right

I’m not all that proud of this comic now. At the time, I saw no harm in it, but now I don’t feel good about kink-shaming people. Enjoy what you’re into. As long as everybody is a consenting adult, it’s not my place to judge, nor any of my business to begin with.

The point remains that Fifty Shades of Gray works as a fantasy because the guy involved is wealthy, handsome, and willing to change for the woman he loves. My understanding is that it’s much harder to find those three attributes in one man that it is to find a guy who wants to tie you up and smack you with a ping-pong paddle.

Note from Missy: This gets into one of the main points of romance novels in general. A lot of people are snotty about romance (only the most popular genre fiction category in the world) because it’s often so “unbelievable” and “unrealistic. ”What are those “unrealistic” elements? Usually that someone would [a] treat a lead character like a thinking, feeling, intelligent human being; and [b] that the other person often realizes they’re being a jerk, apologizes and makes amends, and make a concerted, visible effort to change their behavior and/or opinions. It’s a sad commentary on our world that this is the kind of weird and improbable stuff we fantasize about.

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How to Maximize a Learning Opportunity

Here’s a detail of my former office job I’ve never mentioned. The office we occupied was in a building in downtown Seattle. The space had been extensively renovated by a cash-flush dot-com for use as their corporate headquarters. They had a game room, a conference table shaped like a surf board, and a full screening room with raised theater seats and a little stage in front of the screen. Building the place out must have cost their backers a fortune. It looked great.

I believe they were in the office for about a year before they got bought out and absorbed by a bigger dot-com.

Then the company I worked for rented the office. The first thing they did was pay for extensive renovations. Mainly, they had all of the risers, the seats, and the projector, the screen, and the stage removed from the screening room, restoring the floor to a flat, level state with thin cheap carpeting. It must have cost a fortune. It looked cheap and lazy.

What did we use that room for, you may ask? Mostly client presentations and corporate training seminars.

I used to think about how much money they spent pulling out the theater seating whenever we’d host an event, and I’d set up the folding chairs, all pointed at a make-shift stage in the corner.

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How to Correct an Incorrect Opinion

I believe I’ve mentioned my theory that the menstrual cycle doesn’t directly make women irritable, but men think it does because it makes women severely uncomfortable, and often causes them tremendous pain. Most men either cut them no slack during this time or think it’s some kind of joke. THAT makes women irritable.

Similarly, there’s the common male complaint that women take forever to get ready.

There’s a YouTuber whose work Missy and I enjoy. Her name is Leeja Miller. She’s a lawyer who explains legal issues.

One evening Missy queued up a video in which Leeja explained how she does her makeup.

Okay guys, watch that video. Now try to imagine feeling like you need to do that before leaving for some event. Even worse, imagine you get almost done, then you mess up, or something doesn’t look right, and you have to clean it all off and start over. Now, add to that your spouse pressuring you to hurry, or coming up when you’re halfway done and complaining that you look fine and are wasting time.

Just saying.

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How to Instruct a Trainee

I’m particularly proud of panel three. There’s something about incompetent cursing that always amuses me. I think it has to do with the idea that if you’re shouting insults and profanities at someone it’s already a sign that you’ve lost control of the situation. The idea that you then curse badly makes it even more pathetic.

Once, when I was in high school, my brothers and I went to visit my father and his second wife. We were in dad’s backyard when the kid next door, probably around eight years old, decided to shout insults at my father. Normally my brothers and I might not have found that funny (I say might. There’s a pretty good chance we would have, actually.), but in this case it was 100% hilarious, because the child chose to call our father a “boob butt brain.”

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How to Accept an Apology

In case I haven’t been clear on this, I don’t consider Basic Instructions to be any sort of source of actual, usable, real-world advice.

One time, a young person I think very highly of told me that she had gotten useful advice from one of my comics. My stomach immediately clenched. I asked which comic. She said, “How to Apologize without Accepting Any Blame.”

I hoped she learned to deal with someone delivering a weaselly non-apology, but she told me that I had taught her the technique of seeming to apologize for something you don’t regret by telling the wronged party that you’re sorry they feel mistreated. She used this technique on someone she knew, and it worked.

I feel bad that I made this young person a worse human being. On the other hand, I suppose it’s nice to know that I’ve made a difference.

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How to Appreciate a Mixed Blessing

One of our cats has a new game. She drapes herself across Missy’s lap, gazing up at her and purring for twenty or so minutes. When she’s done adoring my wife, the cat gets up, walks over to where I’m sitting, and bites me on the leg.

It’s like she knows that her affection for Missy will make the bite hurt more.

Note from Missy: to be fair, Cheddar (the lap cat who bites Scott, not the barfing cat [Trouble] who passed away a few years ago) only started draping herself on me for the last year or so; before that she was vehemently anti-lap.  The (hilarious) biting Scott’s legs thing came first.

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How to Stand Up for Yourself

For whatever reason, I’m not coming up with anything to say about this comic. Instead of just spewing out something I think is just good enough, I’ll instead share what is probably the most-watched video in the history of the Meyer household. Both Missy and I have watched it countless times and are still amused by it.

It will either make you laugh, or haunt your nightmares . . . or both!

Note: The video is not in any way obscene, but I still wouldn’t watch it at work if I were you.

[Link, in case the embedded video isn’t showing for you]

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